Virtually all of us in the room had seen SEO spam, ranging from the subtle to the egregious. Years ago, Google’s updates often detected SEO abuses, resulting in the banning of whole categories of sites from the index. More recently, many obvious violations seem to be simply ignored.

It’s particularly troubling to us when one of our clients is outranked by a competitor who is blatantly engaging in practices that clearly violate Google’s webmaster guidelines. We do submit spam reports to Google on behalf of our clients, but the overall results have been less than gratifying.

Have you used Google’s Webmaster Tools to report misbehavior? Did Google take action on your information? Please take our poll and share your experience.